Results for "Planet Nine"

Best Guess

Astronomers Predict Planet Nine Has 5x the Earth’s Mass

Pluto 2.0 In 2006, the downgrading of Pluto left a planet-sized hole in our hearts. Then, in 2014, astronomers proposed that there could be a mysterious “Planet Nine” that’s never been observed and which could maybe, possibly, be lurking at the distant edge of our solar system — and that it could explain our system’s orbital dynamics. Now, California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

Forbidden Steak

We May Be Eating Most Megafauna To Extinction

Mega-steak Those massive animals we know and love, like polar bears, blue whales, and ostriches, may be running out of time on Earth and our insatiable appetite for meat may be part of the problem. A fresh look at conservation data published in the journal Conservation Letters recently found that of most megafauna, defined here

RIP Big Guy

Astronomers Are Watching as a Neptune-Sized Exoplanet Disintegrates

Disintegrating Planet About 800 light years away, a massive exoplanet is having a hard time keeping itself together. And we mean that literally — K2-22b has been crumbling into pieces since before astronomers first discovered the Neptune-sized rocky planet back in 2015. Scientists have since periodically tracked K2-22b’s decay to learn more about how and

Farout

Astronomers Just Found a Dwarf Planet Three Times As Far Away As Pluto

Victor Tangermann

“Far Out!” It’s official: astronomers found a new dwarf planet in our solar system — and it’s the most distant object ever observed in our solar system. “I said ‘far out!’ when I discovered it, and it’s a very far out object,” said astronomer Scott Shepard from the Carnegie Institution for Science, as quoted by New Scientist. The tiny planet is

Lunar Helper

NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Could Assist Commercial Missions to the Moon

Victor Tangermann

Lunar Helper NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) launched in 2009. And it’s still orbiting the Moon to this very day — almost ten years later. And it still has a decent amount of fuel left in its tank — about 44 pounds (20 kilograms) worth according to LRO project scientist Noah Petro. “That may not seem like

Kepler's Day Off

NASA: Kepler Space Telescope is Out of Fuel

R.I.P. Kepler NASA announced Tuesday that Kepler, an orbital telescope that’s been spotting and analyzing distant planets for the past nine years, has run out of fuel and will no longer carry out scientific research. Since it launched in March 2009, the telescope identified over 2,600 planets outside of our solar system, and found that

Time to Shine, CI Tau

These New Planets Are Massive. So Is What They Could Teach Us.

A Star Is Born* *Two billion years ago. But still: the star CI Tau is small and young, comparatively speaking. It’s about 80 percent the size of our own Sun and less than half its age. But the planets orbiting the star? Another matter entirely. New research shows that they’re absolute units, dwarfing the largest planets in

Roll Out

This Weird Robot Has 32 Legs and Is Shaped Like a Lumpy Sphere

See Me Rollin’ We’ve seen robots that hop on one leg, saunter like bipedal humans, and mimic our quadrupedal furry friends But a bot with 32 legs? That’s something we hadn’t seen before. Now here’s Mochibot, on the scene to do exactly that. Botty Long Legs The team of Tokyo-based researchers behind this spherical bot presented

Earth & Energy

No Existing Policies Will Be Enough To Prevent A Future “Hothouse Earth”

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE. Right now, the Paris Agreement is probably humanity’s best shot of reducing the catastrophic effects of climate change. One hundred seventy nine nations have committed to reducing carbon emissions to ensure global temperatures don’t reach 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. But according to a new study, published Monday in the

Off World

Most Of NASA’s Moon Rocks Remain Untouched By Scientists

Forty-nine years ago this Friday, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the Moon. That day, they also became the first people to harvest samples from another celestial body and bring them back to Earth. Over the course of the Apollo missions, astronauts collected about 2,200 individual samples weighing a